FB Reflection

I have been thinking a lot lately about what I have learned from my experience as a Facebook page creator. It was challenging, but I think I have 3 main takeaways that will be helpful for me in the future.

The first: Window of Opportunity

I was very excited to get to work on my page. I was passionate about what I was going to be posting, and I was excited to learn about how many people shared that interest. I invited so many people to the page, around 150 to be more precise, and they started to like my page. The likes were starting to creep up, and my desire to post grew deeper. In the beginning my page had quite a bit of steam. I had people posting on my wall so that I could share it on the page's wall. I couldn't have been more excited to post and see what people thought. I was averaging a post or two a week and I was getting pretty good responses. Then I took about 2 weeks off, and my page's popularity just kind of died out. My window of opportunity had closed. It was kind of depressing, because only my mom would like my posts or interact. I had no idea that people could've lost interest that quickly. It just taught me a lesson that when you're "hot" or "new" to keep posting and going because your time to keep everyone's attention is pretty limited.

The second: Over Saturation 

I think one of the other problems I ran into was that I was sharing stories that people had already seen. I didn't dig deeper for stories that were a little more unheard of. So I didn't really have an original source for positive sports stories. I used a lot of stories from a few of the same sources, and I think that ma have led to people losing a bit of interest in my page. I was always worried about posting too much and annoying people, but it's just as annoying seeing a story just get regurgitated over and over on your news feed. When you're passionate about something you should not be worried about talking too much on social media, because it's more important to know that you are being heard.

The third: Stick to your Guns.  

Knowing what makes your page unique and special is vital to the page's success. I tried experimenting with different kinds of posts, and those experiments failed miserably. I didn't realize that my site was just a source for positive stories. They weren't really thought provoking or a cause for debate. They were just positive stories I put out there in order to have a balance with all the negative ones. Whenever I tried to get interaction it didn't work, because my page wasn't liked by people with that on their minds. I just needed to continue to just share stories and know that people were seeing it. Whether or not they are sharing it isn't my purpose, my purpose was to just make sure that those stories were being put out there.

So now I know. I am grateful I made these mistakes in this class so I won't have to make them in the future.